Adam Arenson is a historian of nineteenth-century North America, investigating the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction and tracing the development of American cities. His work focuses on the American West and its borderlands – from California to the Yukon Territory, from St. Louis to El Paso – and places the experience of European settlement in the region into comparative perspective. Arenson's work on American cities reconstructs how residents made sense of their surroundings by supplementing the written record with material-culture findings and geographic information system (GIS) analysis. See further information on current research projects and classes taught at http://faculty.utep.edu/aiarenson
Articles
The Double Life of St. Louis: Narratives of Origins and Maturity in Wade’s Urban Frontier, Indiana Magazine of History (2009)
A half-century after Richard C. Wade's landmark history The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western...
Freeing Dred Scott: St. Louis Confronts an Icon of Slavery, 1857-2007, Common-place (2008)
On March 6, 1857, in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the...
A Cultural Barometer: The St. Louis Mercantile Library as National Institution, 1846-1871, Missouri Historical Review (2008)
The St. Louis Mercantile Library, from its founding in 1846 to its 25th anniversary in...
Anglo-Saxonism in the Yukon: The _Klondike Nugget_ and American-British Relations in the ‘Two Wests,’ 1898-1901, Pacific Historical Review (2007)
During the Klondike Gold Rush, Americans and Britons connected their joint local experiences with the...
Ansel Adams’s Eucalyptus Tree, Fort Ross: Nature, Photography, and the Search for California, California History (2005)
This article considers the image of California evoked in the unusual Ansel Adams photograph Eucalyptus...
Books
Frontier Cities: Recovering Encounters at the North American Crossroads of Empire (with Barbara Berglund and Jay Gitlin) (2012)
The twelve essays in this edited volume argue for the intersections of colonial and frontier...
The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (2011)
The Civil War revealed what united as well as what divided Americans in the nineteenth...
Contributions to Books
Dred Scott vs. the Dred Scott Case: History and Memory of a Signal Moment in American Slavery, 1857-2007, The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (2010)
The Dred Scott Case centered on the Scott family—Dred and Harriet, and their daughters Eliza...
Libraries in Public before the Age of Public Libraries: Interpreting the Furnishings and Design of Athenaeums and Other ‘Social Libraries,’ 1800-1860, The Library as Place: History, Community and Culture (2007)
Before public libraries became common in the United States, both elite and striving men sought...
Newspaper and Magazine Articles and Blogs
More than Just a Prize: The Civil War and the West, Western History Association Newsletter (2011)
How to unify the insights of the history of the Civil War Era and the...
After the Underground Railroad: Finding the African North Americans who Returned from Canada, Blackpast.org (2011)
The Underground Railroad which fugitive slaves followed from the antebellum South to Canada is now...
"Back to the Battlefield: Field Notes from a Cultural Civil War Historian" series for Civil War Memory, Civil War Memory (2011)
A link to my series of posts about cultural and political concerns on Civil War...
New York Times Disunion series, New York Times (2011)
A link to my contributions to the New York Times' Disunion blog.
The Home Savings Bank Art Project, http://adamarenson.com/homesavingsbankart/ (2010)
For more than three decades, Millard Sheets and his studio of artists designed Home Savings...
Presentations
Facing Out from the Academy: How to Expand Your Writing & Engage a Broader Public, Meggin McIntosh, Emphasis on Excellence (2011)
This teleseminar discusses how (and why) to communicate your work beyond the university, including the...
Book Reviews
Review of Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents, ed. Silvana R. Siddali. Missouri Historical Review 105.2 (January 2011), 117-118. (2011)
A review of Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents, ed. Silvana R. Siddali, a...
Review of Empire’s Edge: American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934 by Preston Jones Pacific Historical Review 77.2 (May 2008), 330-332. (2008)
A review of Empire’s Edge: American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934, an extremely valuable portrait...